OTHER VOICES

Improving early childhood education key to improving life for all

By David LawrenceSpecial to the Star-Banner

Published: Sunday, May 26, 2013 at 6:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Friday, May 24, 2013 at 5:14 p.m.

Editor’s note: The following is part of David Lawrence’s remarks Wednesday when the Public Policy Institute of Marion unveiled the outline of a study it is conducting to improve education for all Marion County children.

This week, the Public Policy Institute of Marion released the preliminary outline of the findings of a study that is, in my estimation, the most important study you could possibly do for your community — and I am quite aware that you already have issued significant reports on such matters as mental health services, youth violence and affordable housing.

But nothing could be more fundamental to the future of Marion County than this one, entitled “A Promise to the Future: How Can Our Community Maximize Academic Success for All Children?” Those last two words, “all children,” is the core imperative here.

I have been coming to Marion County for a half-century now, and in that time, you have grown from a county of just about 50,000 people to now 335,000.

Lots of people think about Marion County and see Silver Springs or horse farms. But, as you know so well, there is way more to this place than those.

What also comes to my mind is your growing diversity; indeed, 43 percent of your students are other than non-Hispanic white. Digging deeper, almost a third of your children live in poverty, 91 percent of your 65,000 children go to public school and so many of your children are in undeniably poor shape.

These four things are illustrative:

Almost half of your third-grade students cannot read with minimal proficiency.

Only 44 percent of your high school sophomores can read at grade level.

Officially, there were 6,090 child abuse investigations last year — imagine how many others there surely were.

Just about 17 percent of your 25-and-older adults have a four-year college degree. You underperform the national average by 15 percent.

Trying to better understand this community, I read a week’s worth of the Star-Banner. There I saw these headlines: “Thousands march for babies,” “Marion highest in Florida for unwed births” and “When playtime turns lethal.” All these items, and more, reminded me of the imperative of getting the early years right.

Meanwhile, national research shows three things:

That 85 percent of brain growth occurs by age 3.

That 30 percent of children start school behind and then most of them get even further behind.

That if a hundred children leave first grade not really knowing how to read, 88 are in similar shape at the end of fourth grade.

Children with momentum in first grade, chances are, will have momentum all their lives. Children without momentum get triaged and tracked in school — and pay a lifelong price. So do we all.

What we are talking about in this PPI study, in this community is a matter of global competitiveness. Listen to this from Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. secretary of Health and Human Services: “We live in an age of human capital being the most important capital that any country has. ... (T)he only way America can out-compete the rest of the world is if we out-educate the rest of the world. ... The only way we can do that is [by] making sure every child gets a healthy start and a rich early learning experience.”

Meanwhile, a national report from retired generals and admirals tells us three of every four young people, ages 17 to 24, cannot enter the American military because of an academic problem, a physical problem, a substance-abuse problem or a criminal-justice problem. This ought to alarm all of us.

We hear so frequently in Florida about the gains we are making in public education. I concede — even affirm — some progress. Yet we are a great distance from being a truly educated nation. In fact, nationally, half of our country’s high school students lack the written, spoken, thinking and problem-solving skills that employers seek. Business people so often complain about the quality of graduates, little knowing that the answer is not to be found in fixing fourth grade, seventh grade or somewhere in high school. Instead, the wisest possible path we could take toward public education “reform” would be to help children to arrive at formal school fully ready to succeed in school and in life.

Get the early childhood years right, and a child will have momentum all his or her life. Then teachers could do far more teaching and far less triaging.

For children to succeed, we need knowledgeable, nurturing, loving parents. For children to succeed, we need high-quality, brain-stimulating child care. For children to succeed, we must have healthy children with real relationships with doctors and nurses.

The most thought-provoking article I’ve read in recent times appeared in The New York Times by Sean Reardon, a professor of education and sociology at Stanford. He wrote: “There is a lot of discussion these days about investing in teachers and ‘improving teacher quality,’ but improving the quality of our parenting and of our children’s earliest environments may be even more important. Let’s invest in parents so they can better invest in their children. This means finding ways of helping parents become better teachers themselves.”

Believing in all children, we help all of us. It simply makes sense — practical, economic and moral. If we want safe and secure neighborhoods, if we want less crime, if we want more people to grow up to own homes and cars, and more people to share the basic costs of societal well-being, then we should know of the quite extraordinary evidence of the power of early investment and the power to grow children who dream and have a real chance to achieve those dreams.

Lillian Katz, one of our country’s great figures in early learning, put it this way: “Each of us must come to care about everyone else’s children. We must recognize that the welfare of our children is intimately linked to the welfare of all other people’s children. After all, when one of our children needs life-saving surgery, someone else’s child will perform it. If one of our children is harmed by violence, someone else’s child will be responsible. ... The good life for our own children can be secured only if a good life is secured for all other people’s children.”

I now spend most of my energies on the imperative of “school readiness” — that is, high-quality early care, development and education. From that vision came the passage of a constitutional amendment for free pre-K for all 4-year-olds in Florida. From that vision, we have been building The Children’s Movement of Florida, with tens upon tens of thousands of followers pushing to make children —- all children — the No. 1 priority for investment in our state.

So many of our priorities seem backward. In Florida, for example, we seemingly can get a road built or repaved just about whenever we want, and yet invest precious little for children — even as we have all the research to tell us that a dollar invested wisely in education will return at least seven dollars in money we won’t need to spend on police and prosecution and prison. Not incidentally, Florida ranks No. 42 — yes, No. 42 — in per capita student spending. How can it possibly be wise, for one example, for Florida to spend a piddling $2,383 on a pre-K slot for a 4-year-old and $51,000 to incarcerate a juvenile.

I do not buy the argument that times are tough, and we don’t have the money. Florida just passed a record budget of more than $74 billion. The New York Times columnist David Brooks reminds us: “The problem is not that America lacks resources. The problem is that they are misallocated.”

Anne Frank, among the most poignant figures in history, wrote this in the years of the Holocaust: “How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”

That, then, is our opportunity. Let us go forth in that spirit. May God bless our children, all our children — and all of us.

David Lawrence is former publisher of the Miami Herald and is now one of Florida’s leading children’s advocates. He is chairman of the Children’s Movement of Florida and lives in Miami.

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